Infants and other incontinent individuals wear disposable garments such as diapers to receive and contain urine and other body exudates. Disposable pull-on garments, having fixed closed sides, have become popular for use on children who are able to walk and often who are toilet training. These pull-on garments have ear panels with edges that are seamed together, or otherwise pre-fastened, to form two encircled leg openings and an encircled waist opening.
In order to suitably contain body exudates as well as fit a wide variety of body shapes and sizes, pull-on garments need to fit snugly about the waist and legs of the wearer without drooping, sagging, or sliding down from its position on the torso. Examples of such pull-on garments are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,171,239 issued to Igaue et al. on Dec. 15; 1992, U.S. Pat. No. 4,610,681 issued to Strohbeen et al. on Sep. 9, 1986; U.S. Pat. No. 4,940,464 issued to Van Gompel et al. on Jul. 10, 1990; U.S. Pat. No. 5,246,433 to issued Hasse et al. on Sep. 21, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 5,569,234 issued to Buell et al. on Oct. 29, 1996; and WO 96/31176 (Ashton) published on Oct. 10, 1996.
Proper fit of pull-on garments can be achieved when the garment applies an appropriate force to the lower torso region of the wearer. Such forces can be achieved using, for instance, a stretchable chassis that expands over the wearer's torso region as the garment is applied to the wearer. The shear and/or tensile forces resulting from the stretched chassis are applied to the side seams as the diaper is worn, and are exacerbated by wearer movement during use. As a result, the side seams need to be sufficiently strong so as to withstand these forces. At the same time, the side seams should fail predictably in response to a user-applied opening force when the article is to be removed from the wearer.
Unfortunately, the strength requirements to maintain integrity during use prevents conventional side seams from reliably and predictably failing in response to user-applied opening forces. As a result, when the user attempts to open the side seam open (e.g., for the purposes removing the garment), portions of the diaper surrounding the side seam may instead tear or fail in an unpredictable manner.
Moreover, conventional garments do not provide the user with any useful indication as to how to most easily open the seam. As a result, while the side seam is configured to be opened by the user, many users do not recognize this and instead tear the chassis itself, or an ear panel area that can be attached to the chassis, when removing soiled garments from the wearer.
What is therefore needed is a side seam for an absorbent article that is sufficiently robust to withstand the forces typically experienced during use, yet configured to reliably open in a predictable manner when the garment is to be removed from the wearer. It would be further desirable to provide a visual indicator on the garment that the user can identify as providing intuitive seam opening.